Bast – Nanoångström

BAST is a blackened doom trio hailing from UK and they have been active since 2008. Their first record “Spectres” was released in 2014 and was very well accepted. Four years later BAST deliver “Nanoångström”. 6 tracks, 58 minutes of epic musical journey into the atomic distances, but only for those who can really appreciate the direction and know how to handle with the route.

BAST music is distant, transcendental, mediative, vast, flowing through the body and the mind and taking the listener to higher state. The album begins with introductory “Distant suns” and goes on with the 10 and half minutes “Far Horizons”, which begins slowly and hardly, but later the track develops and gains solid speed and progressiveness. “The Beckoning Void” is an amazing track. The music just flows through the air with that guitar effect and blast beats. It’s a travel through a time passage, a state of trance. I should probably mention here that it features guest vocals from Chris Naughton of Winterfylleth The title track “Nanoångström” is pure progressiveness, containing shamanic beats leading to the only aim – to open mind and spirit, with hands opened towards higher state of existence. Where the burden could be much more actually…

“The Red Line Through Black” has slow beginning, it is a heaviness drownig into the darkest states, a dropps of blood spilling around. A painful and torturous track before the grand finale – “The Ghosts Which Haunt the Space Between the Stars”, again featuring guest vocals from Chris Naughton of Winterfylleth It is a sick tune, blast beats and that distorted main riff and painful screams. It’s another psychotic trip through a dark tunnel where the mind just goes chaotic, banging itself in the walls aside, searching for some inexisting exit.

To wrap up – “Nanoångström” has sludge and blackened doom elements, black blasts, progressive unevenness amazing guitar themes. The tracks twist and turn in their structure, they develop and suddenly drown in. They easily lead the listener through new gorgeous places of big loss and negative emotion, creating different listening experience and psychedelia. It is an experiment, a science fiction.

“Nanoångström” is a very dense album, soundwise and musicwise. Very complex. An album which creates and destroys states of experiences. I had the chance to spend a lot of time with it since I got the promo couple months ago. It is the most impotnat for it – be be able to drown into it and allow it to drowns you. It as all consuming grandeur dark matter fluctuating through the speakers. It wants to gaze deep in your soul, to rise it high and then to crush it down in obscure obliteration, delivering painful existence, making the soul small and insignificant, leaving it in complete isolation. Without letting “Nanoångström” close, it is impossible to understand what actually the trio accomplished here. It is not a regular progressive doom/sludge/black record. It is an art for the human condition. 9/10 Count Vlad